There’s been a lot of good E61 M5 Touring content coming from DriveTribe as of late, showing off what it’s like to actually own and drive a car most enthusiasts would love to own but are probably too scared to. The E61 M5 Touring is a weird car because, on one hand, it’s the perfect daily driver for a car enthusiast–it’s big, comfortable, fast, practical, and comes with an F1-inspired screaming V10 engine, but on the other hand it’s an unreliable maintenance nightmare. So DriveTribe decided to break down just how much it has cost to own and run for only three months, to give potential owners an idea of what to expect.
Admittedly, this really only applies to UK buyers, because there are things like road tax and MOT that other markets don’t have. But things like insurance can be comparable and the cost of fuel is pretty easy to translate as well. Service costs also factor in and that’s not including the initial service DriveTribe did when they first bought the car, to get it into tip-top running shape. However, those initial services were the sort that most E6X M5 owners should likely do anyway. So how much did it cost?
It wasn’t cheap. However, we won’t go into the sorts of mods and detailing that DriveTribe did because they got a lot of great deals for featuring those things on the channel. Though, the real world sort of costs to run an E61 M5 Touring for three months could get up to around £5,000. That’s including fuel, oil, insurance, and 7,000-mile service intervals. If you throw in the rod bearing service, add a few thousand more pounds to that. So owning an E61 M5 Touring isn’t cheap.
That’s the price you pay for such a car, though. It might be frustrating that it eats a quart of oil every 1,500 miles and that it costs a thousand dollars/pounds to fuel every month. But it’s also one of the very best daily drivers you can find, of any kind. If you want that sort of thing, you’re gonna have to pay.
